Seriously, isn't this cheaper than we can do ourselves? Granted, we need our own program for national security and all that, but this still sounds cheaper than what we have been doing, with the Shuttle program.

They could save far more soldiers lives by not involving them in pointless armed conflicts and military occupations around the globe...

The only way to stop that shit is to get the citizenry turned around to the point where they don't think that it's a triumph for freedom when their kids join the military and get exported to some other nation to bomb brown people.

Familial military tradition is one of the worst blights on peace the world has ever known.

The only way to stop that shit is to get the citizenry turned around to the point where they don't think that it's a triumph for freedom when their kids join the military and get exported to some other nation to bomb brown people.

That's true enough; getting people to believe your lies is usually the first step in controlling them.

Familial military tradition is one of the worst blights on peace the world has ever known.

Not doing the mission at all is even safer; saves more lives, and doesn't require buying a spy satellite.

Not that I'm saying intelligence gathering is a bad thing. We definitely need good intelligence, but its a double edged sword. It does lead to operations being justified that we wouldn't/couldn't do otherwise, and I'm not convinced that most of what gets done really

To be truthful, I don't give a rat's ass about dead soldiers. They voluntarily signed up for that. What bothers me a whole hell of a lot more are the massive slaughters of civilians that the crappy 'intel' prompts every couple of weeks.

Unfortunately this story is now down the page, so this probably won't be read much, but I'm going to correct the false assumption here that seems to have played a major part in this thread.

NASA does not launch military spacecraft. That job, today, falls to the United Launch Alliance (primarily, smaller payloads can go on other US commercial providers), a wholly separate organization from NASA. (ULA does occasionally launch NASA spacecraft, but at that point, NASA is simply a customer who is buying a ride to orbit.) The last time NASA itself launched a military payload was STS-53 [wikipedia.org] in 1992. Since then, all payloads have gone up on unmanned Air-force or commercial launch vehicles. (Why is this? Challenger. The military did not want to be grounded for another two years if another shuttle had an accident.)

So no, we do not need NASA for national security, and have not since 1992.

Back to the point of the main article, I find it interesting that congress appears to be perfectly happy to send hundreds of millions of dollars to Russia for rides to orbit, but have to be dragged kicking a screaming to let NASA pay some American companies to develop the same capability, possibly for even cheaper (i.e. SpaceX's goal of 20-30 million per seat to the ISS)

The Air Force has a parallel launch facility in California designed for launching polar orbit satellites. You can't launch polar orbit rockets from Johnson Space center due to large population centers immediately north and south of the launch site. They launched some sort of spy satellite into polar orbit earlier this year in mid January. In theory they could retool the CA launch center for manned spaceflight inside of a year, since that's what it was originally designed for (up until 1994?).

From the article.."Under the contract modification, the Soyuz flights will carry limited cargo associated with crew transportation to and from the station, and assist with the disposal of trash. The cargo provided per Soyuz seat is approximately 110 pounds (50 kilograms) launched to the station, approximately 37 pounds (17 kilograms) returned to Earth and trash disposal of approximately 66 pounds (30 kilograms). "

Simple math - even back in 2004, the shuttle program had already cost $145 billion. So even if all the subsequent flights had been free, it would still have beenover $1 billion per mission.

Part of this is due to the shuttle never achieving any of its design goals. It was supposed to have a rapid turn-around time (2 weeks), and a usable service life of between 100 and 125 flights per shuttle. The turn-around time obviously was never met, and obviously, the shuttles (

I think that counts R&D -- as well as the cost of the Enterprise (which only flew 1 test mission but still ran about 1.2 billion to build) I was just calculating the "per mission" costs -- which I've since found can range from $400 million to $800 million (depending on cargo off setting the actual cost).

The R&D cost is a sunk cost, but it still has to be amortized over the number of launches. It wouldn't have been bad if the shuttle had met its' design specs (125 launches per vehicle, 8 vehicles in the fleet, with new ones added as the old ones are retired). Also, the $450 million that NASA claims is seriously outdated - the last flights involve a LOT of extra expenses because of aging parts that have to be re-qualified, etc. And NASA doesn't include many overhead expenses as line items directly att

That's what happens when you allow lawyers to design a spacecraft. NASA engineers told Congress "It will cost X-number of dollars to do this right." Congress said, "Do it with X-Y dollars." The engineers came back with a compromise at that price. Now the congresscritters said, "Do it with X-Y-Z dollars." The engineers came back with a different design. Now each congresscritter said, "OK, build this, but you need to manufacture the parts in **MY** district at the factory of **MY** political/financial b

The thing to bear in mind with this sort of calculation is the fact that when you pay overseas for such a thing then that's money straight out your economy, whilst if you in house then even if it costs a little more much of that will come back as income and corporate tax, as well as maintaining highly skilled engineers and perhaps in some sections of such a programme even fostering an export market for certain items which in itself leads to greater tax income.

It's a similar point with military contracts- many in the UK criticise the expense of the Eurofighter programme for example, but ultimately when you factor in tax returns from workers, and factor in the export market it's not a terribly unreasonably priced project overall with added benefits of maintaining skillsets and avoiding independence on too many outside factors. Certainly we'd be far worse off economically and politically here in the UK had we chosen to simply buy in say the French Rafale, or a US or Russian alternative even if the initial price per plane was lower.

Well it would be if America would have won the space race. But they declared victory half-way through and decided not to compete anymore. Soon the US will not even have a manned space program at all. Reminds me of a certain fairy tale involving turtles and hares...

it may be time-consuming, but is it really that expensive to fill out a form?

Time is money. And each form filled out by an actual engineer needs to be handled and checked and processed by a whole crew of clerical people. More money.

<rant>Speaking from the commercial aviation side of the fence, most of these clerical people are the idiot nephews or son-in-laws of someone higher up in management. So they aren't going anywhere.</rant>

I was thinking something similar. I see it as quite a nice thing, it shows a real improvement in international relations, though I can imagine a lot of Americans (especially in "the South") being outraged or embarrassed.

I don't know that I'm embarrassed, but certainly disappointed. I'm not old enough to really have any hate for the Russians, but it really makes me sad that we're dismantling our country's ability to participate in one of the coolest things human beings do.

It's only temporary, sounds like NASA still have plans for their own platform in the future. And even if that didn't happen, why do you care in the end whether it happens in your own country or not? Especially in the context of something like space exploration, we should be focusing on humanity as a whole and not just individual countries. I can understand slightly being proud of your own country, but in the end it makes about as much sense as supporting sports teams.

It's only temporary, sounds like NASA still have plans for their own platform in the future. And even if that didn't happen, why do you care in the end whether it happens in your own country or not? Especially in the context of something like space exploration, we should be focusing on humanity as a whole and not just individual countries. I can understand slightly being proud of your own country, but in the end it makes about as much sense as supporting sports teams.

I don't want to start telling my son "You can be anything, as long as you move to a less backward country [wikipedia.org], like Russia, China, India, Ecuador, Japan, Iran or Malaysia."

Progress costs downtime. Apollo ended in 1975 and the STS started in 1981. That's 6 years of downtime. Thats how you pay for these projects. You don't have funding to launch and build a new system.

The "precious snowflake" generation should be able to handle some downtime in US launches just like the baby boomer generation before them. Making this out to be some huge discrepancy and unique event in US spaceflight is wrong and being overly dramatic.

Word. The space shuttle program has basically been bleeding the rest of NASA's budgets dry, due to international contracts to deliver stuff to the ISS.

And the ISS was basically created to give the space shuttle something to do.

Now that the ISS is finally more or less complete, the shuttle's job is finished so it can now retire. And NASA is going to finally have a substantial budget to reallocate towards other cool stuff (assuming it doesn't get completely eviscerated for other things).

Could anyone in 1971 predicted the expensive and dangerous boondoggle that the STS turned out to be and how we held onto it for at least 10 more years than one can sanely justify? Or how the whole 'reusable' spacecraft didn't pan out economically? Or how a modular capsule design was, in the end, superior to a monolithic shuttle design?

Or that private enterprise is building capsules and rockets for human spaceflight? Or how NASA's budget is a paltry 30 billion while our defense and war budgets along with our

Not to mention that the first shuttle launch was in 1981 and previous to that the last time the US was in space was in 1975. So that's 6 years of downtime. If those people can handle it then then we can certainly handle it now.

$752B is a pretty damn good deal. The shuttle program cost about $5B a year to run, and that was nearly all operational and maintenance costs -- the R&D work was done back in the 1970s and most of the engineers who developed the STS are retired or nearing retirement. It's a stellar (har) achievement from our parents' generation.

Keeping shuttles flying is the equivalent of keeping the conglomerate's old COBOL accounting system limping along for a few more years. It works, but it's less than optimal and

Using our own 60s tech isn't even an option. And the Ares 1 was going to cost $40B to build, not counting the launch costs.

I'm glad we won the space race.

The only reason why not is political (as in NASA politics). Contrary to rumours, all the plans are intact, and many of the engineers are still around - they went on to work on the shuttle program.

Of course, having a launch vehicle that cost $100 million per launch and with more than 5x the payload makes the shuttle program look... stupid. Looking at payload to orbit, the shuttle program's total cost of 170 billion for 135 missions could have been replaced with 25 Saturn V launches. Even if the Saturn

The only reason why not is political (as in NASA politics). Contrary to rumours, all the plans are intact, and many of the engineers are still around - they went on to work on the shuttle program.

They're all working at Boeing now.

Seriously, they transfered decades ago, at the beginning of the Shuttle program. If you took every one of them (even re-animating the dead ones) and put them together today, it couldn't be done. You have to keep your skills honed and processes up to date.

Soyuz has had the advantage of adopting current methods, tooling and parts to its program throughout an ongoing program. The Saturn program needs 4 bit microprocessors. Good luck with that.

Hey, the Russian went to space first anyway, it's not like americans were at the bleeding edge.

So true. The americans needed to take initiative so they developed a plan to land on the moon, and then JFK told everybody that this was the most important step in the universe so far and the first one to accomplish it would rule the world. And it became true. But not because america landed on the moon first, but because russia was bleeding money faster than the us and had to give up the race first.

Strangely enough I saw a Science Channel (yes there was actual Science-related stuff on there) about the Russian mission to put a rover/tank on the moon. They built it and succeeded only a short time after the US moon landing with people. It took the US until 1996 Mars mission to have a similar capability. Perhaps the Soviet space program was ahead of its time in other ways, too?

You're joking, right?

Sure, Edmund Hillary might have climbed Everest in the 50's, but my grandpa was climbing on top of his house at about the same time. Perhaps gramps was ahead of Sir. Hilary in other ways, too?

That's been my thought for a while. But in reality, I suspect we won't see an "Earth Space Agency" until we encounter some sort of global space-based event (alien first contact or a large asteroid on a confirmed collision path). I'd hope for the former not because it's more probable, but because if we wait for the latter it might be to late.

Many nations are at different levels of maturity. Both in terms of culture, and international aggressiveness. Both the US and Russia have come a long way to being more cooperative. But it won't take long before other countries start pissing in the pool, yet again. At that point, both US and Russia will be forced to militarize space against those other immature nations that would not hesitate to do us harm.

Agreed. Wouldn't it be much better & cheaper to create a global space agency. Use the best technology from all the member countries.
We are one people and its about time we started acting like it.

That's a cute notion, but it'll never happen. An international space agency would be so full of politics that it'd be more likely to use the worst technology from each country than the best. We can't even get a long well enough inside the US to properly fund and direct NASA, and you want to throw international politics into the mix?

Still, I'll give credit where credit is due, its a good dream. Though I think for the significant future it will remain a dream.

I for one find it shameful that politics (both sides are at fault) has resulted in this situation. Give NASA the means (funds) needed but don't restrict them to a preset supplier list or technology. Then sit back and let them do the job. Yes, there needs to be specifications, lets say deliver 4 people to LEO with X KG supplies, but otherwise leave them alone.
I do hope that Dragon can ramp up faster since it now appears NASA will not be able to do so.

What exactly is so shameful about international cooperation in regard to the *international* space station? The Cold War has been over for a long time now, you know. And I'm more than a little sick of the residual pride of some of my fellow Americans. To be honest, it was bad enough to put up with all the cocky nationalism DURING the Cold War, much less 20 years later.

The cold war is over, yet the US and Russia are still the two primary arms suppliers of the world, and IIRC, we raised a big stink over France selling bleeding edge naval technology to Russia. The "Cold War" might be over, but that's only because we haven't come up for a new name for it yet. 20 years is a blink of the eye when it comes to imperialist global war.

Erh... let's be sensible and can the anti-Russian sentiments for a moment?

Let's see... diplomatic struggles between Russia and the US. And they refuse to let the astronaut return. First of all, how? The "escape pod" that's by default docked can be used under any circumstances whatsoever, by anyone able to use it (which, I'd assume, every astronaut gets training in by default. Everything else is just plain dumb). So telling him "no" will probably result in an "up yours, undocking NOW!".

Hmm. Lets see how that would play out. Well, we had to bail out a banker whom was a major campaign donor, so there goes the cash for the storage tanks. Add an expensive unwinnable permanent land war in Asia, so we had to cut the robot arm and food production bay to buy ammo. Social security is running out of cash so we'll cut the asteroid mining mission too.

Leaving us, yet again, with:

... they can sit there and stare out at the earth from the... portholes for six months at a shot...

Actually, no the ISS can't stay in orbit without intervention. It's called "Orbital Decay." The ISS experiences atmospheric friction, even at the altitude that it's at. The Space Shuttle regularly uses its thrusters to boost the ISS's orbit at least once a year. I believe that the russian capsule can do the same thing. If we abandoned the station, it would come down in just a couple of years all on its own. Maybe it was a waste of money to build it in the first place, but letting it come down would be

Or to put it another way, if NASA bought flights from SpaceX at the Russian rates, they're essentially saying they can afford to pay $400m for a 7 seat flight, or $190m for a 3 seater.

And there are fucktards in Congress specifically trying to prevent NASA buying commercial crew flights. Why? (I'm from a different country and that offends me. You guys should be setting things on fire.)

Since Falcon 9 + Dragon (booster + capsule, which is what you actually meant, as otherwise there are no seats) is some years from being operational (which is why NASA is buying seats on Soyuz in the first place) - you haven't 'saved' anything. Nor do two Falcon/Dragon flights replace the 6 (at a minimum) to 12 (at a maximum)* Soyuz flights, as the flights are intended to rotate small numbers of crew at a time over a period of two years.

* The number of flights depends on how many seats (1 or 2) the US occup

NASA needs to get their shit together, and develop their own damned spacecraft so we don't have to borrow Russia's ships. If Congress can bail out the evil, lying, fraudsters called BANKS, they can fund science and technology research.

With less than 1/2 of one percent of the annual federal budget, this isn't going to happen any time soon. Maybe if we can stand down the war machine for a while....

Anyway, Constellation was looking like a viable option. Unfortunately, it was way over budget. With the scrapping of Constellation, I think we're going to see some commercial partnerships forming where the launch vehicles will be owned and possibly operated by the contractor.

NASA needs to get their shit together, and develop their own damned spacecraft so we don't have to borrow Russia's ships.

You try getting your shit together when your mission, mandate, creed, materials list, allowed technology, and half of your design are handed down to you from on high by a bunch of technologically clueless dipshits that spent their high school years playing the popularity game rather than learning calculus.

You want NASA to build it's own damned spacecraft that isn't a bloated, over budget, expensive piece of shit? Get their funding out of the hands of the petty, squabbling, corrupt retards that are on th

Who negotiated that, Madoff?. Tito paid only 20 megabucks, and that included the stay on the ISS, not only the transport up and down. Taking a little volume discount into the equation, everything over 15 M$ is plain ripoff.

Who negotiated that, Madoff?. Tito paid only 20 megabucks, and that included the stay on the ISS, not only the transport up and down. Taking a little volume discount into the equation, everything over 15 M$ is plain ripoff.

...

On the other hand there is the hotel room pricing model. Some people stay in a room real cheap (online auction sites, special promotions etc.), at a price below what the hotel could sustain as its across the board rate. Why? The room would have been unfilled, and they carry overhead to take care of the room anyway - it adds to their balance sheet to fill it even at deep discount rates.

Tito was piggy-backing on a planned ISS mission. He was quite literally just paying for an unused seat. The subsidy to Tito

Getting taken to the cleaners by the criminal gangsters and thugs otherwise known as the Russian government, is bad enough without worrying about what will happen if some kind of diplomatic crisis happens, and the Russian government starts using the prospect of the ISS crashing in the South Pacific as leverage in their rather cynical and thuggish foreign policy.

I just got some email about fancy new fully-reclining bed-seats on flights from NYC to Germany. I don't actually have plans to take that flight but I was curious what those seats cost and I balked at the idea of paying $3600 for round-trip airfare. I would have instead gone steerage class on the same flight for $600 round-trip.

By centralizing this service to Russia, and by providing additional funds (assuming they go towards program), you perhaps allow for more development and technology being put forward for this sort of thing, rather than having two super nations running parallel programs essentially wasting money.

Sort of sucks for the USA, I'll admit. However as a human race thing, it might turn out for the best.

This will also undoubtedly be a major source of Russian pride, and may well be better funded as a result.

It was a philosophical difference and we lost. While the Russians refined their skills building (and improving) the same old technology, our Congress was distracted by lobbyists for the STS contractors to build the Next Big Thing. Just a case of, "Ohhhh! Shiny!"

Perhaps we need someone like Stalin, who can go through the ranks of politicians and upper management from time to time and thin the herd. If the mahogany row crowd had to worry about the occasional visit from a death squad, maybe they'd keep their